Mission Control Links

Posts Tagged Mars

It takes me quite a while to get through a book, especially one as thick as Strang Tales, the biography of Dr. Cornelius Strang, discoverer of Planet X and creator of Ellie. At the rate I’m going, we’ll be celebrating ten years of monitoring Ellie on Planet X before I even get halfway through this book. Here’s another scan from the book’s insides (go here for the first one). Just click on the pic below and read how Dr. Strang was inspired to make his great discoveries!

I stayed up late last night, or was it this morning, to watch the live coverage of the latest rover to land on Mars, Curiosity! Cheers went up every few minutes from NASA/JPL Mission Control for each step in Curiosity’s descent to the surface. Once down, it wasn’t long before we were receiving the first photos from the rover’s landing site in Gale Crater.

First, Andy Goldman at Lithicbee posted a really nice revue of Ellie on Planet X last week for Webcomics Wednesday. He was really kind to include Ellie in with the amazing comic Kukuburi. Click the Lithicbee below to read it!

And B) I went to see John Carter over the weekend. Loved it! Here’s my rendition of Disney’s rendition of the King of the Tharks.

The Viking Mars Lander touched down on the surface of Mars on June 19, 1976. I remember watching the first picture appear, line by line, on our neighbors’ TV. It doesn’t look like much, but this was the first photo I’d seen from the surface of another planet! Not counting the moon, of course (it being a moon).

Ellie reader Carsten pointed us to this article at the NASA JPL website. Spirit, one of the two twin rovers that had been making their ways across the Martian terrain, hasn’t been heard from since March of 2010. In March of this year the last attempt at contacting the rover was made to no avail. Finally, after more than six years (five years, nine months more than expected) Spirit’s mission is complete.

Everyone at the Strang Institute bids a fond farewell to Spirit and salutes all those involved with her mission to explore the red planet.